This was a great day for butterfly flight, because they tend to be more active when the sun is shining. The pond is straight ahead; the emergence case is just around the bend to the right.

This is perhaps the zooiest week at Dow Gardens’ Butterflies in Bloom … spring break. We had loads of babies in arms inside the conservatory and strollers parked outside.

There wasn’t time for much picture taking but I did answer a LOT of questions, mostly of the “What kind is that?” variety. With a lot of emergence in the case there were ample opportunities to observe brand-new butterflies, and when one came out halfway but got stuck, I unpinned it from the shelf, brought it around for people to see and as quickly as I could move gently, removed the rest of the chrysalis to free its wings. “It’s like separating layers of wet tissue paper,” I told the handful of people watching, before moving the baby back into the case.

While the wings attract the most attention, I find it interesting how much difference there is in the coloration of the bodies. There is even variety in the eyes, with some solid black while others are spotted.

Among the butterflies on this food dish are a zebra longwing, front, and a paper kite, hanging off the side. The former’s body looks black with white markings, the other white with black.Toward the left you can see the edge of this green banded peacock’s left wing, and the brilliant color it sports on its top side. Look toward the right and you can see that its body matches.This is one of the resident pond frogs. There are two, a male and a female, and they are maybe a decade old. And next to it is a blue morpho, looking pretty oblivious and stupid. Maybe the butterfly was just too big, because the frog ignored it. When one around swallowtail size started to light, though, the frog leapt into action, and both butterflies flitted away.

Today we had the largest paper kite any of us present had seen. Toward the upper left corner is a buckeye.When I first came in for my Butterflies in Bloom shift at Dow Gardens, there were several photographers set up in the conservatory. While one of them was focused on another butterfly, this one settled on his remaining equipment.The object of their attention was this gold banded forester.This great orange tip was content to sit on the emergence case for a while. Down below are some of our laminated ID sheets, which show some of our more common varieties. Once we topped 140, we gave up on listing them all because the photos would have been tiny.This is one of my favorites, because it is so different on the two sides of the wings. While the top is black with a greenish yellow, the underside has tones of brown, white, green and sometimes pink.This was a crasher, a blue butterfly that fell as soon as it emerged. I scooped it up and moved it to a less crowded spot. Within minutes it had opened its wings fully and was well on the way to growing strong.

We had giant owls already, but now we have magnificent owls as well. They are slightly smaller but also differ by the yellow band on the wing.This blue morpho and two giant owls were deeply camped on this food dish. This was the first time I saw butterflies act territorial; many smaller ones got pushed firmly away by an owl’s leg.Can you tell it was a busy day for emergence?This atala hairstreak butterfly is perhaps our tiniest.Just a little larger is this Costa Rican clearwing (yes, cleverly named).

A sunny day meant lots of emergence for Butterflies in Bloom this week. When the temperature hit 85 in the Conservatory, the vents opened, so keeping the floors wet was a challenge this week. I still managed to squeeze in a few photos, and stayed after my shift to try for a few more.

This shows the underside of the wing of the butterfly pictured at top, the spicebush swallowtail. This one is hanging in our “nursery” Norfolk pine for some extra attention and drying time.

A Mexican bluewing still in the chrysalis case. The dark spots on the TENA pad are meconium, or waste fluid, that the butterflies expel as they unfurl and flap their wings to dry while hanging. We put pads under each chrysalis shelf and spray them heavily with water to boost the humidity in the case.

A chrysalis for one of the owl butterflies, I believe the giant owl. See how it’s transparent at the top? The Dow Gardens entomologist, Elly Maxwell Grosteffon, said this one likely would be emerging within the next day.

I reached out to Elly for help when I couldn’t identify this while editing and she told me it is a lacewing. Many photos show the tops of butterfly wings, so identifying by the undersides is harder. It gets trickier still because so many varieties have duller undersides for camouflage, such as the popular blue morpho, which is brown with a line of large spots on the undersides, but a brilliant blue on the wing tops. The blue morphos also are notoriously uncooperative for cameras.

A small postman.

A giant swallowtail.

A queen, which is the type, not the gender. It is somewhat battered, likely from courting rituals. I find the orange Julias and zebra longwings especially amorous, and sometimes gently shoo them out of the nursery when they try to mate with a new insect, such as the orange sulphur that crashed with its wings furled and had trouble hanging onto the tree at all. Sadly, it did not survive.

Above, a pipevine swallowtail. Below, my favorite photo of the week, a paper kite hanging from its chrysalis.